Re: FN-FORUM Actinic Catalog (was: Sites in a box)

date posted 1st November 2000 19:39

Can I just ask, people discussing Actinic are you Mac or PC?

I looked into using Actinic a whil ago and most of these solutions were PC
only. I know I could use virtual PC I suppose but I just wondered if things
had changed at all.


--
Lindsey Hill
www.apperleydesign.co.uk


----------
>From: "Ruth Arnold" [EMAIL REMOVED]
>To: [EMAIL REMOVED]
>Subject: Re: FN-FORUM Actinic Catalog (was: Sites in a box)
>Date: Wed, Nov 1, 2000, 5:53 pm
>

> Hi Ray,
>
> Actinic have added stock management functionality now, though it only
> updates the stock levels by downloading new orders from the site, so it's
> kind of an offline solution.
>
> A client of mine bought ShopAssistant without doing any research and wanted
> me to set it up so that they could modify stock and product descriptions and
> product photos in-house, oh and er, easily.
>
> Ha! Yeah right.... Any of you who have developed a site using ShopAssistant
> will know what I mean on this one.
>
> Basically, they'd have to go and edit the html directly to be able to change
> anything at all. This was waay beyond their capability.
>
> Needless to say I told them to send it back. A bespoke solution would have
> been the real answer but their budget was small and this is going back a
> couple of years ago now. Even Actinic is pretty complex for the average
> businessperson to get to grips with.
>
> ruth arnold
> spacehoppa.com
>
>> I would like to echo Richard Eaton's comments. About a year ago I spent
>> around six weeks wrestling with Actinic to buid an ecommerce site for a
>> client who wanted a 'basic' solution.
>>
>> After the site was launched he wondered where the stock catalogue was and
>> why it didn't warn him when stock was running low and why items on the
>> site weren't automatically marked as out of stock.
>>
>> In other words, what he really wanted was a complete bespoke database
>> driven site! Having said that, Actinic has an excellent "backend" order
>> handling facility based on MSAccess which any client familiar with MS
>> software should have no trouble in using
>>
>> On the next e-commerce project I decided to try out ShopAssistant which
>> is basically a kit of Javascript parts which you can bolt on to a site
>> the rest of which you have designed yourself using whatever tools you
>> like.
>>
>> Eventually, that ran into the ground because if you want to do something
>> which is non-standard, again it was very tricky, or impossible to
>> customise. Having said that, the manual which is provided with
>> ShopAssistant (and which is free to download from the website) is an
>> excellent all round e-commerce primer. (www.floyd.co.uk)
>>
>> In the end it did not take much longer to write a shopping cart
>> application from scratch using mySql and PHP than I wasted trying to
>> customise the out-of-th-box applications.
>>
>> I now have code of my own which I modify for future projects and which
>> can be customised to do almost anything.
>>
>> If anyone would like me to quote for developing a "backend" for one of
>> their projects I'd be happy to oblige.
>>
>> Ray McGinty
>
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